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Library of Congress Will Save Tweets

Not everyone would think that the actor Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter musings on his daily doings constitute part of “the universal body of human knowledge.”

But the Library of Congress, the 210-year-old guardian of knowledge and cultural history, thinks so.

The library will archive the collected works of Twitter, the blogging service, whose users currently send a daily flood of 55 million messages, all that contain 140 or fewer characters.

Library officials explained the agreement as another step in the library’s embrace of digital media. Twitter, the Silicon Valley start-up, declared it “very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history.”

Academic researchers seem pleased as well. For hundreds of years, they say, the historical record has tended to be somewhat elitist because of its selectivity. In books, magazines and newspapers, they say, it is the prominent and the infamous who are written about most frequently.

But although celebrities like Mr. Kutcher may have the most followers on Twitter, they make up a tiny portion of its millions of users.

“This is an entirely new addition to the historical record, the second-by-second history of ordinary people,” said Fred R. Shapiro, associate librarian and lecturer at the Yale Law School.

The library reached out to the company a few months ago about adding Twitter’s content to the national archives, said Matt Raymond, the library’s director of communications. He cited Twitter’s “immense impact on culture and history,” like its use as a vital communications tool by political dissidents in Iran and Barack Obama’s turning to Twitter to declare victory in the 2008 election.

The Web capture project already has stored 167 terabytes of digital material, far more than the equivalent of the text of the 21 million books in the library’s collection.

Some online commentators raised the question of whether the library’s Twitter archive could threaten the privacy of users. Mr. Raymond said that the archive would be available only for scholarly and research purposes. Besides, he added, the vast majority of Twitter messages that would be archived are publicly published on the Web.

“It’s not as if we’re after anything that’s not out there already,” Mr. Raymond said. “People who sign up for Twitter agree to the terms of service.”

Knowing that the Library of Congress will be preserving Twitter messages for posterity could subtly alter the habits of some users, said Paul Saffo, a visiting scholar at Stanford who specializes in technology’s effect on society.

“After all,” Mr. Saffo said, “your indiscretions will be able to be seen by generations and generations of graduate students.”

People thinking before they post on Twitter: now that would be historic indeed.

A version of this article appears in print on April 15, 2010, on page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: It’s History, So Be Careful Using Twitter. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe